Crazy Cricket

These days we have been doing some work to pay the bills, and it has been boring. Then Cesar came to me with this crazy and simple game called Flappy Bird and told me is ruling the seven kingdoms. And I said “really? we can do that in like 5 hours”, so we did it.

Why are we releasing the source code? Well, it’s not like this game has some rocket science behind… actually the physics took 2 lines of code.

this.speed.y += this.gravity;
this.y+= this.speed.y;

We are giving the source code for 2 reasons:

1) Because we want to encourage Adobe Air development. Is a pretty neat framework for building games for iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows and OSX. And most media has been mean to it for it’s association with Flash. But the truth is many games have been developed with it and we want to help it gain some momentum with new and old developers.

2) Because it has the most common questions answered for new developers. How do I integrate Game Center or Google Game Services in my app? How do I integrate ads? How do I store data locally? How do I deal with multiple resolutions? etc. If anyone want to contribute to it, so be it.

We got so much fun making this game (it took about 4 hours of development) that maybe we will be releasing a couple of games as simple and silly as this one, if you have any suggestion let us know at rolf@crazycricket.com or cesar@crazycricket.com.

Thank you to Google (yet again) for featuring The Tapping Dead on the Google Play Store! We are extremely excited to see our first game heading in such a great direction. But wait! This isn’t for the good Old USA this time – it is on stores world wide: The United Kingdom! – (screenshot) and….Germany (Prost!), France (Salut!), Belgium, Spain, Australia (OZ), Italy, Russia (Na sdarovie!), Bulgaria, Egypt, Kuwait, Switzerland, Canada (Cheers eh!), Norway, Turkey, Denmark, Isreal, Sweden, Ukraine, and Japan! Domo Origato Japan!

Thank you all for your support! Please remember to give us feedback to improve the game! We have added a great deal already, including new characters, facebook, twitter, new weapons and items to help get through those gruesome 150 levels!

This is very exciting news for the Crazy Cricket team, we got nominated by Google Play to be featured on the Homepage, and after some tweaks and enhancements to the gameplay, we finally got the Green light from them!.

In the next weeks The Tapping Dead will be featured on Google Play Homepage, listed side to side with other big games from top studios tell us we are doing things very good for our First Game.

We officialy released our first big update, this is The Tapping Dead v1.2!

We have been closely listening and reading all of your comments, reviews, video reviews, and also we have been closely watching the metrics inside the game. After long hours of meetings with the team and analyzing all of the data. we decided it’s time for a major update to the game.

NO MORE LIVES!
The first noticeable change is that we removed entirely the LIVEs from the game, that’s right!, you now have unlimited lives to keep trying to get trough the levels in the game.

ZOINS REIMBURSEMENT
Since we removed the lives from the game, and too many of you purchased a lot of extra lifes, we decided that the only way to make up for that is to reimburse you all the zoins you used! So right from the start you will get back those zoins, so you can purchase POWERUPS.

POWERUPS
That’s right!, we added Powerups to the game, this will make it a bit easier to get trough the hardest levels of the game, the power ups are as follows:- Zombie Blood: makes you invisible to zombies for 10 seconds.- Mask: protects you from one hit of zombies or projectiles- Time Warp: slows zombies and projectiles for 10 seconds.
And you can even combe them!

TUTORIAL
We added a tutorial so you can learn the ropes of these new mechanics, very straight forward and easy to learn.

SWIPE TO PAUSE
We removed the Pause button and instead changed it to a simple swipe gesture, so when you are tapping to stop the hero, you can just swipe in any direction to pause the game, and also use any powerup currently available or get new ones.

SQUASH MINI-GAME GIVES ZOINS
The mini-squash zombie game on the main map, now gives you Zoins, instead of lives, so keep squashing those zombies to get some extra zoins!.

UNLOCKED FIRST 4 BUILDINGS
Get to play on any of the first 4 buildings, we have unlocked them all except the prison, in order to unlock it, you still have to finish all the other buildings first to unlock it. If you used zoins to buy any of those buildings, you will get back those zoins.

ENDING
We added an ending to the game, you just have to finish the prison to see it… can you? .

An Android version will be available in June of this year. (that’s 2013 btw). And… BlackBerry. Yep.

What is The Tapping Dead?
Well, as its name suggests, you are tapping your way through a 150 levels of Zombified buildings in San Antonio Texas! Calculate well people or you can die quite easily and lose lives! While you make your way through these scary mazes in this 90’s styled platformer, you are also picking up Zoins, that allow for a variety of purchases: mainly new lives (later maybe powers). Tap to pause the main character as they run through the labyrinths of the dead and avoid getting hurled on, trampled, eaten or worse!

Collecting Zoins on each level is very important! Though, also, be patient and you can get through this entire ordeal alive.

The Tapping Dead comes from San Antonio Texas based company: Crazy Cricket, LLC.
This is Crazy Cricket’s first of many games to come.

Many thanks to Rodolfo Ruiz, Cesar Briones, Cristian Partica and Rico Garrett for their contribution to making this game a true success.

Stay in the loop and visit CrazyCricket.com for more news about The Tapping Dead and more!

Darren – LOL.
Ok, Darren is a super red neck. While that ain’t a problem and certainly not a set back, it’s fun to comment on. His country charm was great in his home town of Kerville, Texas, but does little to woo the Zombified girls he encounters. Darren is a hunter, so he’s quite adept at killing squirrels (which he can cook up many different ways), he can also shoot the stumbling undead with amazing accuracy. Daren loves his baseball cap (Houston Astros of course) and it is crazy what lengths he goes to protect it. This one time, in band camp… wait, that was a different story…

So Darren meets our crazy crew at a Clear Internet Store, owned by RUWireless, a San Antonio wireless company that Darren worked with. He thought he’d get a few of his co workers on board, but found out they had all become The Tapping Dead! The crew wanted to try to see if the internet was still alive and get online to find out where they could get some help. Darren, the country bumpkin, is smarter than he looks! He and Mark, actually did contact someone… who? Wait to find out!

Get ready to ruuummbbbllleee! Andre is an ex boxer who loves the Spurs, the San Antonio Basketball team.

Andre was born and raised in San Antonio, so he’s fluent in both Spanish and English. This helps little of course when dealing with the illiterate zombies! But… Andre is a total bad ass, and can knock the head off the living or dead! He’s a little on the ‘loco’ side, so can be a tad impulsive, to say the least.

After the first few weeks in this weird new world, literally beating the dead to ‘death’ again, he decided to seek out some new friends where his talents could be of better use. Andre, we love ya bro – tap those heads! Woot!

Meet Mark! Mark is our nerdy buddy who originally comes from Shiner Texas, where the great beer Shiner Bock was born.

Mark is a computer programmer who’s computer skills don’t apply in this new world he was thrown into. However, his analytical mind is a huge benefit when dealing with these rotting corpses. Mark met up with our crew in downtown San Antonio, at the Geekdom offices, were he was hoping to find other like minded survivors.

He was surprised to find Alice and Bill, who were looking for someone just like Mark, to help them calculate their options in a way that only someone like Mark could do. Mark, needless to say was happy to find a group he could be a part of while learning how to survive in this odd future. Mark lacks a bit of common sense, but he makes up for it in more ways than one! Good luck Mark! We are all rooting for ya!